Golden Gate Park is three miles long and effectively two different parks. The eastern mile contains the museums, the glasshouse, the tea garden and essentially every visitor who comes here, and it is a formal, Victorian, heavily designed landscape. Keep walking west and it gradually stops being that. The paths get rougher, the planting gets wilder, the crowd thins to nothing, and eventually you come out at the Pacific past a pair of full-sized Dutch windmills that almost nobody in the city has been to see.
The western end is exposed, foggy and much further from a coffee than it looks on a map. Ask Karpo what the weather is doing out at the ocean before you commit to walking the whole park.
The park changes as you go west
The eastern end was laid out as a formal nineteenth-century pleasure ground and reads like one — clipped lawns, ornamental planting, buildings arranged around a concourse. It is genuinely beautiful and it is also where the coaches park.
West of about the halfway point the design intent loosens considerably. The paths wander, the tree cover closes in, and there are long stretches where you can lose the sense of being in a city at all, which is a rare thing to be able to say about a park inside a dense grid.
The far western end is essentially stabilised dune with trees planted on it, which is literally what it is — the whole park was built on sand and the western edge is where that origin is still legible. It feels less like a park and more like coastline that has been persuaded.
The windmills and the bison
There are two Dutch windmills at the ocean end, built in the early twentieth century to pump groundwater for irrigating the park before the city mains reached it. They are full-sized, they are odd, and they are surrounded by tulip beds that come into flower in late winter and early spring.
There is also a bison paddock, which has been there since the 1890s and contains an actual herd. It is one of the more genuinely surprising things in San Francisco and it sits on a road that most visitors never reach.
Neither costs anything and neither has a queue. Between them they make a strong argument for the western half being the more interesting one, or at least the one that gives you something you cannot see somewhere else.
Ocean Beach at the end of it
The park terminates at Ocean Beach, a very wide, very long, very cold stretch of the Pacific. It is not a swimming beach — the currents are genuinely dangerous and the water is cold enough to be a serious risk — but it is an excellent walking beach.
The road that ran along part of it has been converted to a car-free public space, which has changed the whole western edge of the city and made walking or cycling along the oceanfront a realistic proposition rather than an unpleasant one.
Sunset here is the reason to time the walk westward rather than eastward, and it is one of the few places in San Francisco with an uninterrupted western horizon. It is also, very often, completely fogged in, which is part of the deal.
The neighbourhoods on either side
The Richmond runs along the northern edge and the Sunset along the southern, and both are residential districts that visitors rarely enter. Both also have a genuinely good and unglamorous food scene, particularly along the avenues running north to south.
The Richmond side is strong on Chinese and Russian food and has been for generations, with long stretches of Clement Street given over to it. The Sunset side, particularly towards the ocean, has developed a cluster of small cafes, bakeries and bars over the past decade.
Either one is a far better place to end a long park walk than turning around and going back to the museums. Coming out of the trees into a residential avenue and finding somewhere to eat is the correct end to this particular day.
Doing it without exhausting yourself
Three miles across the park plus whatever you do at either end is a real walk, and it is usually into a headwind on the way west. Underestimating this is the standard error and it turns a good day into a grim one somewhere around the halfway point.
Transit runs along both edges of the park, which means the sensible plan is to walk one direction and ride back. Walking west with the intention of taking a bus home is far better than attempting a round trip on foot.
Cycling is the strongest option for covering the full length, especially with the central road closed to cars. It turns the whole park into something you can see properly in an afternoon rather than a route march with a decision point in the middle.
Practical notes
The park is about three miles end to end. The western half is emptier, wilder and largely ignored by visitors.
Two full-sized Dutch windmills and a bison paddock sit at the western end. Both are free and queue-free.
Ocean Beach is for walking, not swimming — the currents are genuinely dangerous.
It is colder, windier and foggier at the ocean end than at the museums. Dress for the west, not the east.
Walk west and take transit back along either edge rather than attempting a round trip on foot.
Cycling is the best way to cover the full length now that the central road is car-free.
The Richmond and Sunset avenues flanking the park are the right place to eat afterwards.
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Ask Karpo first
The western end is a different climate from the eastern end on the same afternoon. Ask Karpo what the fog and wind are doing at the ocean, and where to eat on the avenues when you come out of the trees.
